By Steve Goddard
El Niño made it’s last gasp this week. Note that SST’s in the equatorial Pacific went from above normal to below normal during the past few days.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/plots.php
Is there a La Niña on the way? Most of the models said no in April, though it appears they may be already wrong – given that they forecast positive ENSO through the summer. Two models forecast a very strong La Niña.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.pdf
The last El Niño to La Niña transition occurred in 2007, and caused a sharp drop in GISS global temperatures.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:2006.9/to:2008.1
Most of the US had a miserably cold winter during the recently deceased El Niño. It is not pleasant to think what a cold La Niña winter might bring.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/maps/current/index.php?action=update_userdate&daterange=DJF&year=10
Here was my prediction from February, 2010 :
Flashback to 2007 – SST To Plunge Again?
Steve M. from TN says:
May 14, 2010 at 7:06 am
Really simple people: All possessive pronouns do not contain the apostrophe. his, hers, ours, theirs, its. You wouldn’t put on apostrophe on theirs, don’t do it on its.
Aagh! Don’t even suggest it!
It’s probably too much to expect commenters to adhere to spelling rules, but may I pedantically suggest fixing the first sentence of the lead post?
/Mr Lynn
While we’re at it: “All possessive pronouns do not contain the apostrophe.”
This should be expressed as “No possessive pronouns contain the apostrophe”. All followed by a negative is grammatically clunky.
Steve – That’s a very interesting graphic.
Every part of the animation contains blobs which appear one day and dissapear the next. That aliasing – a sampling issue which has a nasty tendency to completely wreck data.
I wouldn’t use this data.
I’d like to see other temperature data at daily resolution too – I suspect they are all completely wrecked by aliasing.
Christ, is that funny! They can’t accurately predict a La Niña one month ahead, but they are supposed to be able to predict the climate 200 years ahead.
I literally burst out laughing – the very first time I’ve done that here.
I mean, it is not like ENSO is a bit player in climate, so if they don’t even know what THAT is doing, how in Yahweh’s name can they even pretend to know what the hell is going on?
@ur momisugly Enneagram May 14, 2010 at 11:39 am:
The last graph on the link, entitled the longitude of the geomagnetic and Z-magnetic equators crossing (20-year steps), claims
It doesn’t do anything of the sort. Just like the Hockey Stick leaves out the LWA and the MWP, that graph is missing the 1860> and 1920> inclines in the global temperature. Yes, it does have the 1940-1970 decline and the 1980-1998 incline. But prior to that it misses the mark. It is in that regard like the CO2-vs-temp graphs that miss the fact that the 1940-1970 decline occurred right in the middle of the industrial era CO2 incline.
I have no idea why that chart link didn’t make it in to my earlier post-the site’s on my other computer, I will try again-grrrr….
@Bob Tisdale May 14, 2010 at 6:48 am:
Bob – A question:
Is everyone certain that the winds are a causative agent in all this? My take on winds from school was always that the winds were at the tail end of the wagging tail.
Just as in the recent post here about G&T’s greenhouse paper it was asserted that the GROUND heats the air, not the other way around, I’ve always understood that the wind currents are a resultant of the heating of the land and water (and the rotation of the Earth).
So my understanding of El Niño has always been in the direction of, “What is happening in the deep ocean that is bringing all this heat up?”
ESPECIALLY as the El Niño occurs in the area with the Doldrums, where typically the winds are vertical, not horizontal.
Evidently I am out of phase with the current thinking, but I’ll be damned if the logic doesn’t seem backward. I just can’t see surface winds pushing the ocean around at anything less than a few meters. (This may be what comes from trying to be a self-didact.)
And may I humbly ask that you not point me at some “scientific” web links? After AGW, my confidence in such links isn’t all that high. Learning by rote or by diktat have no allure for me; if it’s something I can’t logically register, I put it on some back burner until I collect enough information to put it together myself. Maybe a brief explanation as to where the holes are in my thinking would do, and maybe educate folks here, too. (But most here probably already know the logic behind all this.)
@ur momisugly Pamela Gray May 14, 2010 at 6:12 am:
Pamela, do you know what the depth is of the thermocline in the equatorial Pacific where the El Niño forms?
This wind peeling” (not “pealing”) the surface waters off – this happens over hundreds of miles? Isn’t that a lot of water to skim off without turbulent mixing long before the warm water layer is deposited outside the area?
This may happen when the thermocline is millimeters below the surface in a localized area, but is it a reality when the thermocline is several meters deep and over hundreds and hundreds of miles?
And, as I asked Bob Tsidale just above, isn’t El Niño formed in areas where the Doldrums predominate (the Intertropical Convergence Zone), meaning the horizontal winds are at a minimum? If the Doldrums can’t move sailboats, how do they move all those cubic kilometers of warm surface water?
I am having trouble meshing all this into a coherent system in my mind’s eye. There are some conflicts of what I understand as reality.
@CRS, Dr.P.H. May 13, 2010 at 9:46 pm:
I love in the Chicago area, too, and would want to inform the other readers here that almost the whole year has been colder than normal (anecdotally speaking, anyway), until a recent period of about 10 days, when it has been warmer than usual. (I was expecting the warmers to come out with their sky helmets to protect them against the falling sky, but that didn’t happen, maybe thanks to Climategate.)
And, though it was colder than most recent winters, I didn’t think the past winter was anything outside our standard deviation. Except in early-to-mid December, there were essentially none of the below zero (F) days – not that I experienced, anyway, in the far NW burbs.
stevengoddard says:
May 14, 2010 at 5:01 am
John Finn
I think there is something wrong with the satellite temperatures. Had-Crut isn’t out yet for April, but through March – 2010 has been #5 after 2002, 1998, 2004 and 2007. Similar story for GISS.
Satellites seem to wildly exaggerate El Nino events.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1978/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1978/normalise
Hang on a minute, Steve. You’re now complaining that satellite temperatures don’t agree with the surface temperatures. But I thought the surface temperature records couldn’t be trusted because of the various problems which are discussed with great regularity on this blog. I hope you remember this when satellite temperatures dip while GISS/Hadley temperatures remain high – as will happen at some point.
The truth of the matter is that there are, more often than not, good reasons why there are discrepancies (sometimes large ones) between the various datasets. ENSO being one. Despite this, the 4 main datasets have been remarkably similar particularly over the past 20 years.
Patrick Davis says:
May 14, 2010 at 8:11 am
“P.G. Sharrow says:
May 13, 2010 at 9:21 pm
When I was young and learning about such things ( 55 years ago).
It is = it’s
It in plural = its
It in ownership = its’”
Sorry. No such word as its’.
IanM
JC (May 14 3.28a.m.)
in my part of N.Z. we haven’t seen any mountain snowfalls (in the Tararua and Ruahine Ranges) as yet. With a few exceptions where I have lost the data, I have kept verygood records of the mountain snowfalls here as seen from the Manawatu plains since 1980. The latest arrival of snow since 1980 was on June 13th 2003, and June 10th 2007.
2003 was notable in that there was only one severe snow event at the beginning of July which saw snow down to 100m above S.L. around the Manawatu Gorge, and almost in Palmerston North. It also shares with this year the dietinction of having the only frost in the official summer period (between the Dec Solstice and the March Equinox) in the past 56 years. The rest of the 2003 winter had few, and mainly weak snowfalls compared to normal. In 2007 the snowfall numbers were close to avaerage but the severity was well below average.
Despite the current warmth in New Zealand the recent “Southern Hot Period,” (Nov 6th-May 5th) ranks as the 19th coldest for the Manawatu region in the past 56 years, based on the mean of the daily temperature maxima (T-Max) over the ‘hot season.’ I use T-Max from the data because us lay people relate more to T-Max than the daily mean. I politely suggest that if you ask anyone on the street what the mean temperature for the day was then you would most likely get a blank stare! Ask the same people how hot the previous day was and you are more likely to get an accurate answer. Anthony and the other meteorologists are probably laughing and will have many good reasons not to use just T-Max as an indicator. So be it. This is the path that I chose.
As can be seen from the postings regarding this and several dozen others on this site, there is more to understanding the climate than just temperatures alone. Temperatures are just a symptom or indicator of ‘how’ we are going but in themselves don’t explain ‘why’ we are going the way we are. Every season north or south seems to through up unexpected surprises. One thing that I have found since I have gained access to more data is the obvious natural variabilty seen here in my lifetime (53 years), and no trend towards warming or cooling either way.
Cheers
Coops
Ian L. McQueen, May 14, 2010 at 5:51 pm:
“Sorry. No such word as its’.”
Which brings up the apostrophe lesson.
John Finn
I quote GISS temperatures all the time. Other writers may have different opinions. This is not a Borg.
Bob Tisdale says:
May 14, 2010 at 1:44 pm
R. Gates wrote: “Yep, this El Nino is gone, and we may get a La Nina setting up…such is the nature of these cyclical climate events. Did you notice how warm the central and northern Atlantic are?”
Would you care to explain why they’re warm? Would you care to predict how long you expect the El Nino-induced variations in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic (which are what caused the recent rises in SST anomalies there) to linger? Or are you just pointing out the obvious?
You are asking something of him that he likely doesn’t understand.
R. Gates says:
May 14, 2010 at 10:12 am
Yep, this El Nino is gone, and we may get a La Nina setting up…such is the nature of these cyclical climate events. Did you notice how warm the central and northern Atlantic are?
Is that caused by manmade co2?
Bill Illis says:
May 14, 2010 at 7:29 am
I appreciate your graphs very much Mr. Illis.
So would you be of the opinion, because of those graphs, that this cooling will soon show in land temperature stations? I can’t know what you’d say to that unless I ask.
I have noticed before that LT temps tend to go up more in El Ninos than surface temps. I see no reason to believe that in this case anyone is fiddling the data, but am always ready to be persuaded by evidence. But if that is indeed the real data there must be a mechanism. Seems to me that if there’s a burst of warmer-than-usual air from an El Nino it might push further up into the troposphere – as well as spreading horizontally as usual – thus affecting LT temps more than surface temps. Incidentally, I think more-than-usual CO2 goes with it [but more work needed before I can substantiate that].
Anyway, until someone shows this particular data is unreliable, isn’t it what we have to work with?
Feet2theFire – re ENSO and winds: What I assume happens is that in an El Nino warm water (driver unknown) rises in the ocean, and after that its warmth is distributed by winds which may or may not themselves be influenced by the El Nino and/or whatever drives El Nino. And of course the water at the surface may be moved by the winds too. Although there is a change of wind pattern associated with an El Nino, it does not appear to be the main cause. I am not at all an expert in this, so would be happy to be corrected.
Mike Jonas says:
May 14, 2010 at 8:28 pm
“Although there is a change of wind pattern associated with an El Nino, it does not appear to be the main cause. ”
Would not warm water rising cause thermal expansion, which in turn produces air movement?
Bob Tisdale says:
May 14, 2010 at 1:43 am
Amino Acids in Meteorites: Thanks for the links to Joe Bastardi’s forecasts. He keeps mentioning a cold PDO, but the PDO is positive:
I don’t think he’s talking about a given day right now but instead in general over the next ~30 years.
see this video
http://www.accuweather.com/video/41870064001/is-the-earth-cooling-or-is-the-data-just-fooling.asp?channel=vblog_bastardi
I think us “skeptics”, or whatever we are called, pay closer attention to the wording of what “skeptics” are saying than global warming believers do.
stevengoddard says:
May 14, 2010 at 7:48 pm
John Finn
I quote GISS temperatures all the time. Other writers may have different opinions. This is not a Borg.
Resistance is not futile.
Les Francis says:
May 13, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Les,
You took the words right out of my keyboard.
You are absolutely correct. Joe Bastardi has been calling for this change in the climate. He was looking for a drop off in temp later on in the summer, a big drop.
We all await further developments.
Feet2theFire: Regarding the doldrums, the winds being discussed in the quote from Steve Goddard (not Stephen Wilde, my mistake in the attribution), “ENSO events have more to do with wind strength along the equator…” are the trade winds, and as you are aware, don’t necessarily occur along the equator. During La Nina and ENSO-neutral phases, the trade winds push warm surface water west where it collects in the Pacific Warm Pool to depths of 300 meters. When the trade winds relax, the warm water sloshes east, and that’s the El Nino. The “along the equator” would be better written as “in the tropical Pacific”.
Amino Acids in Meteorites: You replied, “I don’t think he’s talking about a given day right now but instead in general over the next ~30 years. ”
The assumption is that there is a 60-year cycle in the PDO, but there is no historical evidence of one:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-there-60-year-pacific-decadal.html
Bob Tisdale, you are wrong.
In the usual state there are no Doldrums in the eastern equatorial Pacific.
There is a lot of wind converging towards Indonesia.
The wind blows right along the Equator, and in the Tropics too!
Have you ever seen the maps here: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/jsdisplay/ ?
Paolo M. wrote, “Bob Tisdale, you are wrong.”
Please quote the sentence or sentences you believe are wrong.